Shadow Chase

By Mike Coppin

Shadow Chase is a journey-of-discovery novel in which Ryan Garland travels to Java to unravel the mystery of what happened there to his late father as a young soldier following WWII. Ryan must also confront here-and-now issues, as he learns more about the people of Java... and himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Coppin
• Release date: Oct 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536572834

Mike Coppin

Born in Western Australia, Mike Coppin spent five years living in Java. Among other things, he has worked as a welfare worker, researcher and teacher. His interests include reading (novels, history, anything about Indonesia), writing (creative and expository) and music (classical, jazz, 1930s & 40s music).

Book preview

Chapter 1

2015, November 26th, Thursday – Surabaya, Indonesia

Ryan Garland’s plane banked as it circled over the sprawling port city of Surabaya, capital of East Java, before approaching Juanda Airport.

To his bird’s-eye view the outskirts of the city presented their colours of drab-orange roof tiles, deep-green treetops and grey lines of road and alley. In the shadowless half-light of dusk, he could see quick flashes from artillery, small fireballs of exploding shells and, here and there, flames engulfing buildings. He could see, as the plane circled, panicky crowds scattering this way and that, some of their number pausing to return fire as khaki-clad soldiers pursued them. As the plane came in lower for landing, he could make out dead bodies – many, many bodies – strewn across street and alley. He seemed to smell the blood and the cordite, to hear the noise of shells and shots and screams piercing the humid air.

Impossible, of course. Not because he was seated near a roaring jet engine, but because the smells and sounds, like the sights of combat, were all in his imagination. In reality, the flesh-and-blood battle had happened seven decades ago and Lance had been right amongst it, a reluctant part of it, and survived. But not to tell, not to Ryan.

Now Ryan was retracing Lance’s steps as best he could, coming in by Garuda Airline rather than British troop-carrier. Garuda: monster eagle of Asian myth and national symbol of the Republic of Indonesia, that hard-striving, strife-ridden country of two hundred and fifty million souls spread across an archipelago more than five thousand kilometres from west to east. Ryan had been to the country, formerly known as the Dutch East Indies, a number of times before but not knowing what he knew now, and what he knew now changed the way he felt about the place.

His interest in Indonesia had begun because of Lance, his father. Lancelot Garland had been a product of that unique and now long-vanished society, the families of rank-and-file soldiers in Britain’s eastern colonies. Lance had been born in His Britannic Majesty’s Malay States, today part of Malaysia, and it was there he had spent his childhood. The family had just managed to escape to India as the Japanese forces invaded the peninsula in 1941. A few years later Lance joined the Indian Army, part of the British imperial forces, and spent some months in Java, the volcano-strewn island that stretched nine hundred kilometres across the centre of Indonesia.

Ryan’s father had always been silent about his time there unless questioned and even then his responses would be curt. Nor did his wife, Doris, encourage their children to delve into it.

‘Where was Daddy in the war, Mum?’

For young Ryan, as for his parents, ‘the war’ invariably meant World War Two.

‘In the East Indies.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘A long way from here.’ His mother’s voice was guarded, her gaze averted through the kitchen window to gum trees and pastures on their farm near the town of Northam, in the wheat-belt of Western Australia.

‘What did he do, Mum?’

‘I’ve told you before.’ A crisp tone now. ‘He fought for his country and its friends. The Allies.’

Another question was forming on Ryan’s lips, but his mother anticipated it.

‘And I’ve told you not to bother him about it. Mind you don’t.’

Street lights, car lights and house lights could be seen flitting beneath the plane now, as it made its final approach over darkening fields on the edge of the city. Something made Ryan’s mind slip back to a time in his early teens. It was Remembrance Day and he had just heard a radio feature about ‘our boys’ coming home after the end of World War Two. It had prompted his mother, listening with him while his father was out in the far paddock, to murmur:

‘We had a terrible Christmas, waiting for your Uncle Clive to come home, and hearing rumours.’

Clive was her brother, who had been interned by the Japanese in Singapore. After that cryptic remark, she clammed up. When it came to the topic of the war, Doris was only slightly more forthcoming than her husband. Ryan never knew whether that was to avoid painful memories or to spare his youthful sensitivities.

Something in the radio broadcast puzzled him. It had mentioned that the Japanese had surrendered in August 1945, but he also knew from his mother that Lance had returned to his parent’s home in India in May the following year. What had happened during the intervening time? He decided to ignore his mother’s admonition and broach the forbidden subject. That evening, when his father had put his feet up with the newspaper, he plucked up courage and approached the man whose height and solid frame could seem intimidating, even though Ryan himself was tall for his age.

‘Dad, where were you after the Japanese surrendered?’

The newspaper was lowered a little, revealing pale blue eyes.

‘You’ve been told before, son. In the East Indies.’

A deep breath from Ryan. ‘Why were you there, Dad?’

A slight narrowing of his father’s eyes. ‘We had to take over from the Japs, see. Holland had been badly mucked about by Hitler, so it wasn’t in a state to do much. The Yanks were busy in Japan and the Philippines, so it was left up to us Brits.’

Ryan persisted: ‘But why did it take so long?’

Suck of breath through paternal teeth, then: ‘There were complications.’

‘What complications?’

A slight pause before reply. ‘Practical complications. You’ll understand these things more when you’re older, son. Now give your old man some peace.’

Time to retreat.

* * *

1945, August 20th – Bombay, India

‘So, where do you think they’ll send you, my darling?’

Young Lance’s fiancée gazed anxiously at him, her brow creased with worry. He looked back fondly at her olive-skinned face.

‘I don’t know, Imogen. None of us know. The Krauts have been beaten, so there’s not much call for us in Europe. But the Japs are holding out – they’re stubborn little blighters. So maybe we’ll be posted to Burma or somewhere like that, to help drive them out... It’s a cert, though,’ he added quickly, to allay her fears, ‘that we’ll give them a good thrashing. I hear they’re on their last legs.’

They were standing in the moonlight at the rear of her mother’s modest bungalow, where Lance had come visiting straight from going off duty. Even at nineteen years old he looked impressive in his army uniform, being robustly built and standing six feet tall. Imogen particularly fancied his pale blue eyes and wavy brown hair, though it was now cropped short and plastered to his scalp with Brilliantine. It always pleased Imogen that he looked so English: such a catch for an Anglo-Indian girl. Now she fretted about what might happen to him.

‘You will take care, though, wherever you go, won’t you?’ she asked, in her sing-song voice.

Lance smiled inwardly at the idea he could choose to ‘take care’ if he were involved in army action anywhere. In truth, he yearned for action, not just to strike a blow at the enemy, but to break the tedium of barrack life and to escape. Escape from the strictures of his parents, escape from the pettiness of the stratum he had been born into, escape from Indian society – which he found less to his liking than that of the Malay State of Perak, where he had grown up. And escape from Imogen’s cloying ministrations.

After he had left school at sixteen, Lance had found work as an office boy at the Pan-Orient Trading Company. He met Imogen at the Railway Institute reading room, where he had gone to find Sherlock Holmes novels and she had gone to find a man. The Institute was one of the few places where her kind were treated truly equally, and lads from ‘other ranks’ families were the only Britishers likely to become seriously involved with them. Romance of sorts had developed but, to Imogen’s great chagrin, the day Lance turned eighteen he had enlisted with his father’s regiment to do his bit for the war effort, and for other motives. The next eighteen months had been spent chafing at the limitations of life as a warrior-in-waiting, aching for action.

Now, on her back porch, he assured her: ‘Definitely, I’ll take care, Imogen.’

He rarely addressed her as ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart.’ Terms of endearment had never come easily to his lips, though his affection was deep and he thought he loved her. Imogen was just a year younger than him and, after their first meeting, she had attached herself to him like a lost child. She had yearned for security, stability, someone to watch over her, ever since her father died and she needed those things even more now, as the British Raj began to come unstuck from communal violence and ‘Free India’ nationalism.

They stood silently for some moments, taking in the moon-glow and the trees glistening from a passing shower. Imogen felt it was like a scene from a Noel Coward play or a romantic movie (ignoring the sweat dampening her armpits) and let her shoulder rest against his tunic as they stood with their hands on the balustrade.

‘When the war is over, very soon, you’ll get a discharge, won’t you? Then we can settle down and start a family. Build a life for ourselves.’

‘Yes... yes, we could,’ Lance nodded, though his heart was not wholly behind his words. Certainly, having a family appealed to him but he was far from in a hurry to reach that goal, fond though he was of Imogen. A chap needed to see something of the world – he would say to his pals – a chap needed to experience a decent chunk of life before being tied down by family responsibilities. The army offered a passport to travel and adventure that office jobs never could. He had often wanted to say this openly to Imogen but could sense she was not receptive, so he merely made hinting remarks which she showed no sign of grasping. Perhaps she did not want to.

‘But,’ Lance went on, ‘we could do that while I’m still in the army. It’s a secure job and we’d get some benefits, just like my parents.’

Imogen wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh, but you know what I want for us, dearest. If you went back to the trading business, you could work your way up and make something of yourself, so our children could live comfortably.’

She was alluding indirectly to the way Lance’s family had to scrape by on a sergeant’s pay, ill able to afford little luxuries. Lance, with his social background, would never get into officer corps but he might, with his energy and intelligence, make a go of business. The British Dominions were still places of opportunity to become a successful self-made man, even without much education or status to start out with.

Lance suppressed a sigh, as he so often did with Imogen. How often had they had this same exchange: four, five, six times? Each time, he had failed to get through to her that he could not stomach the thought at this stage of his life of spending several deadening years as a junior clerk, which would be obligatory to get on in a company. Nor had she been receptive to his idea of completing another five years in the army (he had signed on for the duration of the war). This time, he did not even try to convince her. Instead he said, with a gentle smile:

‘Well, be sure I’ll try to do what’s best for us, Imogen. And remember, we’re still quite young yet.’

Indeed, Imogen sometimes did think of him as older than his years, as did many people who had contact with him. He was so solid physically, so steady emotionally, so contained in his behaviour. Self-control was his keynote; his face rarely gave free rein to his feelings and his tongue rarely voiced his inner thoughts. Indeed, with his battened-down personality, he often did not acknowledge things that were happening inside himself, such as how his nerves were becoming increasingly grated by Imogen’s little ways.

At that moment, her mother called to them through the open doorway: ‘Come and listen to the radio. We’ve won another battle against the Nips.’

Imogen took her man by the arm and guided him back into her family nest.

* * *

1945, August 20th – Kronosari village, near Surabaya

Seventeen-year-old Salina lay prostrate on the earthen floor, sweating in the sticky heat. In her early teens she had been quite pretty in the way of village girls in Java. Her body had been well rounded for her age but the flesh had since shrunk on her bones and her eyes, once attractively large, appeared ghoulish in her pinched, drawn face. Right now her eyes were closed and stinging from the effect of so much crying, but she was cried-out now, drained and numb.

If she opened her eyes all she could see would be the earthen floor, bare except for the rough mat she was lying on, the woven bamboo wall stabbed with needles of white sunlight, and the lowest part of the thatched roof, for there was no ceiling in the little four-roomed house. There would be nothing much to see in the other rooms either, for all the furniture and most of the belongings had been sold off to pay for food.

Something else was gone, too, and it left an empty space in Salina’s soul far more than the lost possessions did. Her mother’s presence, her mother’s warmth and support, had gone forever to ‘live in heaven’, as it was termed in her language.

When the Japanese had invaded Java three years earlier, swiftly overcoming any Allied resistance, Salina had still had both parents, neither of them yet middle aged. Like tens of thousands of native Indonesians, Salina’s father had soon been picked out by the invaders as a romusha, a drafted labourer, and taken away from the village. Her mother had almost lost her wits waiting for word of her husband, word that never came. Over the next few years, she was ground slowly down by worry, poverty and malnutrition, eventually succumbing to some illness for which they’d been too poor to pay a doctor to diagnose. The burial had taken place just a few days ago.

Now, fitfully, Salina was revisiting in her mind the crowded events of the past week. It was just a week ago – both a short time and an age – when her elder brother, Seno, had come rushing back to the village with another lad. They had been at a neighbouring village when the news arrived (someone in the other village had a radio) and the news had been electric: the Japanese were beaten! The God-Emperor of the great Nippon Empire had announced that it must ‘bear the unbearable’ and accept it had lost the war.

Then, just five days ago, any doubts they may have had were dispelled when word came through of the Japanese surrender. No more than two days after that, the villagers were excited all over again. Their hero, the charismatic nationalist leader named Sukarno, had gone on air and announced to the world, with potent brevity:

We, the people of Indonesia, do hereby proclaim the independence of Indonesia. All matters pertaining to the transfer of power, etc, will be carried out expediently and in the shortest possible time.

The prophecy of the ancient seer had come true: Indonesia for the Indonesians! The Japanese were to stay to maintain order until a new regime was established. Surely they would hand over to the nationalists, as they had promised to do some while ago? The villagers were full of hope, and even Salina’s mother had smiled and seemed to rally her strength a little. But it was a false glow, the final flicker of a guttering life, for only the next day she took a sudden turn and was dead by sundown.

Her death was a tremendous blow to both her children, though Seno, having previously assumed the mantle of man of the house, now readily took the burden of caring for Salina onto his nineteen-year-old shoulders. Those shoulders took yet another blow just the day after the funeral: he had been laid off from his job as a field worker. Right now he was out in some neighbouring area, anxiously seeking other work but knowing all the while that others in the village were in the same situation.

Salina, lying on her mat, contemplated their lot and was filled with despair.

Chapter 2

2015, November 26th – Surabaya, East Java

Thump-thump! The aircraft touched down roughly, jolting Ryan out of his reverie. The reverse thrusters whined as the plane decelerated down the runway. Then, while it was still taxiing to the disembarkation point, homebound Indonesians jumped to their feet, pulling down luggage from the overhead compartments and ignoring the exhortations of cabin crew to stay seated. Ryan stayed put.

Interesting people, Indonesians, he thought. Interesting, and often hard to anticipate. They tended be either very laid-back and impervious to the demands of time or, in certain situations, frenziedly flurried. Being behind a steering wheel was one such situation. Getting ahead of others in a queue was another, like now, as they jostled each other for positions in the aisle.

For his part, Ryan had time: ten weeks, in fact. As an economist at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, he was using the summer vacation to do some lecturing in Java and a bit of research. At least, that was the cover story, one good enough to stand up to scrutiny by Indonesian officials, because it was true enough... at one level, anyhow. But a deeper purpose was carried in his head and his heart: to make a journey back to the Surabaya of the 1940s, in an exploration of a critical time in his father’s life, and try to uncover answers to questions that the year just passed had flung at him.

Questions like: who had been the recipient of the money that Lance had sent to an account in Indonesia for over fifty years? What had happened way back then, to be the cause of the payments? Why had Lance kept them secret, perhaps even from the wife he doted upon? Who was the enigmatic Tiger Harry, and was he still alive? And just who was that Asian girl in the photo, whose face Ryan could picture clearly but whose very name was a mystery to him? In short, what were the missing pieces of Lance’s life, the pieces that Ryan did not know and his father never talked about? Pieces that seemed to have their origin in the steamy tropical city of Surabaya.

The last of the passengers were now filing past Ryan, one of the few bulé, or white people, on the flight. As they did so, he got up, stretched his lanky body as far as space would allow, ran a hand through his sandy-brown hair and joined the queue to disembark. The questions would have to wait until at least tomorrow to be acted upon, for first he must settle into new digs under the auspices of Sartosa University in Surabaya, which would be his base for pursuing his research, in league with some university staff. The man assigned as his prime contact was a likeable rascal and alleged scholar named Agus Basuki, inter-campus liaison officer for Sartosa.

It was twenty minutes before Ryan finally fronted the immigration desk where a stony-faced officer inspected his papers, checking each item carefully.

‘There’s a mistake here,’ said the officer at last.

Ryan knew there was not. He also knew, from sore experience, that the man was angling to extort money from him. On anything other than a tourist visa, a foreign visitor was seen as fair game. Ryan held a work visa.

‘What mistake?’ he asked.

But the immigration man did not deign to reply; as a government official, he felt he did not have to answer questions. Slowly, he picked over the papers again. No hurry. Eventually he said: ‘Yes, I think there’s a problem.’

Ryan had already geared himself for this sort of war of wills and he was determined not to offer money. Taking a line he had mentally rehearsed earlier, he said:

‘Maybe there’ll be a problem if I have to contact your Regional Director.’

The official blinked but his face remained granite-like as he scrutinised this Westerner for signs of bluff. Ryan’s expression bespoke seriousness. Conceding defeat made the official angry, though emotion showed itself only in the force with which he banged stamps in the passport and in the contemptuous jerk of his head to gesture the bulé through the checkpoint.

At least Dad didn’t have to cope with this sort of thing, thought Ryan.

Having made it through Customs, he cooled his heels in the arrivals concourse. Long after other passengers from his flight had hailed cabs or been picked up by someone, he was still waiting for his own contact to greet him. Agus was notoriously unreliable, even by the Indonesian standard of ‘rubber time’. Ryan was tossing in his mind whether to stay because Agus might arrive an hour late or to leave because he wasn’t coming at all, when a short stocky man in a grey safari suit came running from the car-park, dodged taxies in the pick-up bay and barrelled toward him.

‘Ryan! Mister Ryan! Sorry-sorry!’

The man was panting as he tried to smile, while anxiety showed in his eyes.

‘Was traffic jam,’ he explained between puffs.

‘Gus, me old mate! How are ya?’

From former habit, Ryan lapsed into broad Australian when talking to Gus, who had shared student days with him in what now seemed a previous life – a life before graduation, marriage, children, bereavements. Looking at the teak-brown face filled with genuine affection for him, Ryan could not help forgiving Gus for the long wait.

‘Am good, yah. Good,’ replied Gus, beaming with pleasure now.

A few more words of greeting, then luggage was bundled onto a trolley and pushed outside. Wham! Hot humid air assaulted Ryan’s lungs. By the time they had loaded the car, his shirt clung to his skin with sweat. Get used to it, he thought, it will be like this from now on.

They set off through the brief equatorial twilight, catching up with each other’s news. Something along the way caught Ryan’s eye. Their route had taken them down a road in which stood a government office building. Some of its windows were smashed, paint was splattered on the walls and graffiti daubed on the door.

‘What’s that all about, Gus?’

‘Oh, that. There was demonstration the other day, against what happening in our economy. You know, the government is gradually take subsidies off public things like water, electricity –’

‘– Public utilities,’ Ryan interjected.

‘Yah, utilities and also of petrol and paraffin. The World Bank and IMF say Indonesia must do these things. But the poor people, the little people are hurting, more and more hurting. So when kerosene go up recently, some people attack that building. This kind of thing keep happening now.’ Gus shook his head sadly. ‘Maybe things might get real bad again, like in ninety-eight.’

In that year the Indonesian currency had bottomed, banks fell, inflation spiralled and public discontent rose to boiling point. In May, some demonstrating students had been shot. Various groups with axes to grind had gone on the rampage, egged on by armed goons later suspected to be military personnel. The long-suffering poor had ransacked shops, racial bigots attacked Chinese establishments, religious zealots torched nightclubs, and there was general chaos for nearly a week. This had happened mainly in Jakarta, the national capital, but Surabaya had been affected too. Glancing at Gus, Ryan realised that his friend was truly anxious.

‘Surely it won’t get that bad again?’ he asked.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ replied Gus, with typical Javanese vagueness. ‘But things are getting worse again, the same sort of things that caused the trouble back then. Unemployment is bad, perhaps twenty percent. People had high hopes when General Suharto stepped down, but they haven’t become reality, though the new President is trying hard. Some people are feeling frustrated.’

‘What were they hoping for, Gus?’

‘That corruption would be reduced. That nepotism would be wiped out. That politics would become transparent...’ Gus’s voice trailed off and he sighed. ‘None of it has happened yet.’

Ryan wanted to say something reassuring but could think of nothing plausible: he knew Indonesia was too unpredictable to have any certitude about what the morrow would bring. The two friends lapsed into silence.

At last they came to the university staff housing estate, where Gus had a modest semi-detached unit; a small room in it would be Ryan’s base for the coming months. Gus’s wife Elsini, a pleasant woman of faded prettiness, greeted him warmly. They chatted a little and Ryan dutifully cooed over their sleeping daughter. As it got late, Gus and Elsini went to bed, but Ryan sat up in his room while things kept going round in his head, especially about the personal purpose of his journey. A recent domestic tiff popped up in his mind.

‘Ten weeks!’ Sharon’s voice had been shrill, her eyes angry and accusing. Ryan had rarely seen her like this before. ‘Ten whole weeks at this time of the kid’s lives, with them facing exam results, love problems, Christmas and God-knows-what! Don’t you think they need you here?’

Their son Jared was nineteen and studying at university; daughter Gemma was eighteen and doing a hospitality course. Jared lived in a student dorm, while his sister still stayed at home.

‘They’re not kids any more, Shaz. They’re young adults.’

‘They still need a father around,’ Sharon retorted. ‘And what about me? Do you think it’ll be easy for me to give support to them and manage everything else while you’re away?’

She did not say she wanted him near her, he noticed, just that it would be hard to manage alone.

‘No,’ Ryan conceded, ‘but it’ll be for everybody’s benefit in the long run. The research I do there will allow me to develop my doctorate. Then I’ll be able to get a senior lectureship or better, secure some more consultancies and pull in more money for all of us. And I’ve got to get to the bottom of this business about Dad.’

‘Oh, Lance’s bloody mysteries!’ She spat the words out; he’d had no idea she felt so intensely about the issue. ‘You’ve become obsessed about them. If he was entitled to some secrets while he was alive, why can’t you let them rest now he’s dead?’

He’d had no clear answer for that one, not even for himself. His mother, Doris, had died two years ago of a stroke and Lance had followed from heart attack barely a year later. Ryan was executor of the will and had scrutinised his father’s financial papers in detail. They had been diligently kept in order all Lance’s life, nothing thrown away, and were as straight-forward as befitted a man of his generation and stolid temperament: a savings account, some modest investment funds and insurance policies. No debts. Ryan’s parents had been very frugal while they owned the farm, neither borrowing big nor spending unwisely, and when they sold it they had cleared their debts. What they saved over the years had mainly been spent on their three offspring: Liz, Meg and their much later ‘baby’, Ryan. They had left nothing much behind other than a modest amount of money and freehold title to their retirement house in the town.

No surprises in all that, except for one set of records that instantly had Ryan puzzled. They were carbon copies of authority notices from Lance to his Australian bank, from 1952 through to a few years before his death, authorising quarterly payments to an un-named account number with BMP Bank in Surabaya. The installments had begun in petty amounts and increased in small increments until they reached forty Australian dollars in the end. Sure enough, when Ryan checked against the bank statements, the withdrawals were recorded there, too insignificant in size to have caught his attention beforehand.

Why had Lance begun them in the first place, as soon as he had migrated to Australia? And why had he continued them every month without fail for the next fifty-plus years? Why then, had they stopped in 2003? From Australia, Ryan had been unable to find out the name of the account-holder. Calls to BMP had been met with Tidak bisa (No can do) or Tidak boleh (Not allowed), the stock responses in Indonesia to out-of-the-ordinary requests.

Something inside Ryan had told him that the answers to this puzzle were important in ways he could not know then, but that he had to seek them out for his peace of mind. His sisters had been intrigued by the enigma without feeling any obsession to resolve it but Ryan, with his ferret-like impulse to sniff out anything he could on whatever piqued his curiosity, had not been able to resist the challenge. He had systematically gone through all other personal papers and possessions that his parents had left in the house. The search had revealed little that he did not know already, and nothing of relevance to the bank payments. Next, he had gone through what the family